Mendacity in Early Modern Literature and Culture

Ingo Berensmeyer is Professor of English and American Literature at Justus Liebig University, Giessen, Germany, and Visiting Professor of English Literature and Culture at Ghent University, Belgium. His research interests range from Shakespeare to contemporary literature. His most recent publications are 'Angles of Contingency': Literarische Kultur im England des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts (2007); study guides to Shakespeare's Hamlet (2007) and to Literary Theory (2009) and the co-edited book Perspectives on Mobility (with Christoph Ehland, 2013). Andrew Hadfield is Professor of English at the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK, and Visiting Professor at the University of Granada, Spain. He is the author of a number of works on early modern literature, including Edmund Spenser: A Life (2012), Shakespeare and Republicanism (2005), and Literature, Travel and Colonialism in the English Renaissance, 1540-1625 (1998). He is vice-chair of the Society for Renaissance Studies and is currently writing a book on lying in early modern England.

Introduction: Mendacity in Early Modern Literature and Culture 1. Hiding the Peacock’s Legs: Rhetoric, Cosmetics and Deception in Shakespeare’s Lucrece and Trussell’s Hellen 2. Mendacity and Kingship in Shakespeare’s Henry V and Richard III 3. ‘An Anxious Entangling and Perplexing of Consciences’: John Donne and Catholic Recusant Mendacity 4. Truth and Lying in Early Modern Travel Narratives: Coryat’s Crudities, Lithgow’s Totall Discourse and Generic Change 5. ‘Betrayed My Credulous Innocence’: Mendacity and Female Education in John Milton and the ‘Battle of the Sexes’ 6. Lying, Language and Intention: Reflections on Swift